Unacceptable Anguish
by Catslynw
Summary: Oneshot. Pre-series. Character exploration. Every hunter has his own hidden anguish, his own private pain. They are their own species, separate and apart from the rest of mankind. Homo doloris. Grieving man. - John Winchester


Unacceptable Anguish

Nothing is so publicly embarrassing, nothing so socially unacceptable as grief.

Grief, real grief, is bad manners. It makes other people uncomfortable. For the first few days after a loss, it is expected. For the first few weeks, it is tolerated. When months have passed it becomes a matter of awkwardness. When it's been years, grief becomes distasteful to the observer, something to be belittled. The bereaved ceases to be an object of pity and compassion and becomes instead an object of derision and fear. No one is supposed to be so broken for so long. To see another person suffering daily anguish years after a loss leads the observer to ask that most uncomfortable of questions: could this happen to me? Could I become so lost, so broken, so distraught? Safer by far to believe that the grief-stricken are also the damaged, that there is something inherently wrong in their make-up, something that has left them unable to heal, something that couldn't happen to _you._

And there is always the possibility that the grief-stricken may be taken for a mere attention seeker. The pain, the loss, the ongoing distress can be safely disregarded as the trappings of self-pity, the 'oh poor me' syndrome. This neatly obviates the observer's social requirement to be sympathetic and compassionate. Instead, the observer can make a few noncommittal noises, roll their eyes and walk away, leaving the bereaved to suffer on alone. Second chances need no longer be given. Allowances need no longer be made. It becomes acceptable to hold the grieving man responsible for his actions, to fire him, to berate him, to threaten him with any variety of consequences if his behavior does not change. One can even threaten to take away his only remaining reason for living… his children.

Only in one community on Earth is this untrue. Among hunters, no one will expect you to talk about your grief. No one will push you to open up, to share your pain. No one will expect you to heal overnight, and most won't expect you to heal at all. But no one will look askance or think it odd when a grown man bursts into sudden tears, when he smashes chairs or screams or pounds his own fists bloody. Every hunter carries with him a burden he can never put down. Every hunter has his own hidden anguish, his own private pain, and hunters accept that the same is true for all of their kind. They are their own species, separate and apart from the rest of mankind. Homo doloris. Grieving man.

Even among hunters, however, everyone handles their grief a little differently. Some few allow it free reign. They don't tend to last very long. Uncontrolled grief leads to uncontrolled actions and that leads to death. Rapidly. Take this kid I ran into one day at Daniel Elkins' place. Good looking boy. Young, for a hunter, though he was five years older than my Dean when I first met him. Smart too, from what I hear. Resourceful. His name's Gordon Walker, and he specializes in hunting vampires, which explains why I first saw him leaving Daniel's place that one day as I was going in. He was twenty-one at the time, grief and rage fresh and raw, his own loss a mere two years behind him. Who he lost, I couldn't say, but it was easy enough to guess that a vampire had been involved. As for the recentness of his bereavement, well, a body could read that in his face as easily as one could read the rage that drove him. I knew he'd either learn to control that rage and rampaging grief, or it'd burn him out. I hoped for his sake that he'd get it under control. It helped if you had someone hunting with you, someone older and more experienced guiding you, but Daniel's assistance would have to suffice for Gordon. I had enough problems of my own.

I was surprised but pleased that he was still alive when I ran into him a few years later at a roadside bar in Wichita. He knew my name, came right up to me and stood beside my table, a bottle of beer in hand. "So you're Winchester," he said without preamble. "I hear you're good. Some say the best." If that's what they said, it was the first time anyone had said it to _me_. The praise didn't impress me, and neither did announcing my name in public, even if it was just in a bar full of civilians. Still, the kid had a nice smile, and something about his cocky self-assurance reminded me of Dean, whom I missed when I was on the road. So I kicked out the chair on the other side of the table and invited him to sit down. We talked for hours, something I rarely do, let alone with a relative stranger. He told me his story. A vampire had broken into his home and bitten his sister. His family had thought him crazy or a liar after her disappearance, and he'd been completely unable to explain without getting locked up as a nut, so he'd walked out on them without a backward glance. Gordon had been hunting ever since. I didn't tell him my story and he didn't ask. He'd obviously learned at least some hunter etiquette in the years since I'd previously seen him. The rage I'd sensed in him that first time was tamped down, banked but still burning merrily beneath the surface. There was still every chance that he'd burn out one day, let his rage carry him into some action from which he couldn't escape. He'd turn his back on the wrong monster, piss off the wrong hunter or let himself explode in front of a group of civilians and wind up dead or in jail. For a hunter, dead was probably preferable. Being trapped in a cell, knowing what could come hunting you at any moment, unable to defend yourself, unable to defend those you cared about… that was my idea of Hell.

We parted on friendly terms. He said maybe we could do a hunt together one day. I grunted amicably enough but said nothing, unwilling to commit myself, and we went our separate ways. I hope the kid makes it. I hope he learns to control that rage instead of letting it control him. He could learn a lot from my son, Dean.

Like Gordon, Dean uses his anger at every dark and unnatural thing to fuel the fire that keeps him going. Unlike Gordon, Dean is in no danger of losing sight of what matters. If Gordon Walker is uncontrolled grief in action, then my boy is the perfect example of channeled grief. Dean hates the supernatural, hates everything about it, but he never lets that hate blind him or distract him from what always comes first, saving the people we can, avenging the ones we can't, and killing as many evil bastards as possible along the way. Like me, he misses his mother every day, and I know he wants to get the thing that killed her almost as badly as I do. But for Dean, revenge is definitely secondary. With my eldest boy, grief is always leavened by hope. Rage is always tempered by love. That's my dude all over. People come first. Protecting the innocent is just what he does. It's who he is. His anger and grief serve his compassion, they don't control it. Dean is a better man than me, and someday he'll be a far better hunter. He seems born to this life, as if hunting were literally in his blood, and considering the things I've learned about Mary's family over the last few years, I suppose it is.

Yeah, Gordon could learn a lot from my Dean, but there's no way I'd ever let him near my boys. Hunters in general are too reckless, too prone to attracting trouble of all sorts for me to let any but the very best of them get close to Sam and Dean. They don't need those kind of negative influences, especially Sammy. I wish Gordon well, I just don't wish him anywhere near my kids.

No, the only hunters I've let into the boys' lives are people like Bobby Singer and Pastor Jim – hunters with experience, with control and with their priorities straight. Not that they're any more perfect than the rest of us walking wounded. They just express it differently. Take Bobby Singer. Bobby's the type of hunter who's buried his grief down deep where no one can see it, not even him. That man's got his pain and loss shoved so deep down inside him, that most people can't even tell it was ever there. With most hunters, hell, with most people, the agony of a loved one lost to violence and evil is like an ugly bruise. It may change color and shape, it may fade gradually over the years, but it's always there, just below the surface of the skin, painful and obvious to everyone who sees it – but not with Bobby. Nope. The only things obvious about that man are his total disregard of personal appearance, his poor house-keeping skills and his obsession with research. Now, I was never what anyone would consider a Beau Brummell even before Mary's death. Since her murder, I've had even less concern for how I look. Mary preferred me clean shaven or at least neatly trimmed when I insisted on sporting a beard. These days, as long as my hair and clothes aren't actively frightening the mundanes into flight or screwing up a cover identity, I really couldn't care less. Yet even I find myself occasionally overwhelmed by the desire to take a needle and thread to Bobby's wardrobe or, better yet, to toss out the entire contents of his closet and start afresh. The man owns more than dozen truckers caps and every single last one looks like it's been through the war – hell, three wars. He once told Sammy that his "holy" shirts helped protect him from demons. At eight years old, my youngest found this patently ridiculous and informed Bobby that he would never get a girl looking like that, a sentiment with which Dean heartily agreed. Bobby just shrugged and went back to wiping his grease-covered hands on the legs of his tattered jeans. Hopeless.

Bobby's complete disinterest in clothing is unconscious. He literally doesn't give it a thought. His housekeeping, however, is another matter entirely. You look at that house and you can see clear as day that a woman lived there once, a woman who cleaned and decorated and planned a whole big family in those rooms. That woman, Bobby's wife Karen, is gone now. And every day, Bobby buries the signs of her existence a little more deeply beneath the debris of his new life. Does that mean he didn't love her? I don't think you need me to tell you the answer to that question. The wallpaper is still there, what you can see of it behind the gradually growing forest of bookcases. The knickknacks are tucked safely away in cupboards, out of sight, but they haven't been thrown away. Go searching for mugwort in the back of the pantry one day and you might come across a picture of smiling blonde wearing a kitchen apron and wielding a rolling pin like a cudgel. Go searching for some extra rounds of blessed iron shot and you're likely to find an old paperweight that proclaims proudly, "I left my heart in Atlantic City." I think they went there on their honeymoon. The paperweight is a piece of crap. A man who didn't care would have thrown it out. A man who cares too much just doesn't want to look at it anymore. Remembering hurts. So stop remembering and get on with life. If Bobby had a motto, that would be it.

The obsession with research is easy to explain, but probably hardest of all to live with. You see, Karen died not because of what the demon who possessed her did to her, but because of what Bobby did to her. In his defense, Bobby didn't know anything at all about the supernatural back then. He'd never encountered a ghost before, let alone a demon. So when his beloved wife had started acting strangely, poisoned four neighborhood children, been caught poisoning a fifth and then attacked him with a butcher knife, Bobby had done what any sane ordinary person would have done. He'd fought back. In the struggle Bobby had managed to wrench the knife away from Karen – or more likely still, the demon had _let_ him get the knife – and he'd stabbed his wife right in the sternum… and she'd just kept coming, clawing at him like rabid animal. At that point, any remnant of sanity that Bobby could call his own had packed up, hit the road and left no forwarding address. He struck again and again, and still Karen kept coming until finally, laughing, the demon had blown him a kiss and fled the now mortally wounded body of Bobby's wife. She'd been three months pregnant at the time, a fact he only found out after the autopsy. Karen's obvious involvement in the deaths of several local children coupled with Bobby's good reputation and undeniable temporary insanity – clearly brought on, to the Sheriff's way of thinking, by discovering that his spouse of ten years was a child murderer – earned Bobby a verdict of not guilty by reason of diminished capacity and an extended stay in the psych ward of the South Dakota Human Services Center.

The whole situation damn near killed him. It wasn't the knowledge that real evil exists that left him reeling. It wasn't the simple fact of demons or the unnerving existence of the supernatural in general. No. It was learning, six months after the fact, that sixty seconds of Latin could have sent the demon packing and left his wife damaged but very much alive. It was what he _hadn't_ _known_ that had killed Karen, and Bobby never forgave himself for that. Now, Bobby can't know _enough_. Before losing Karen, he had been an exceptionally bright man with a high school diploma, a library card, a passing interest in military history and a willingness to settle for the simple, uneducated life of a tow truck driver. Now Bobby can speak five languages fluently – or at least he could the last time I counted – knows a smattering of words and syntax in an additional dozen languages, knows the folklore and traditions of damn near any culture you care to name, can recite over three dozen variations on the traditional Catholic exorcism by heart, and is generally a walking, breathing encyclopedia of everything dark, dangerous and demonic. Like I said, Bobby will never know enough to lay the ghost of his murdered wife to rest, despite the fact that her body was salted and burned long ago. He never talks about it, never shows the slightest sign he even remembers Karen, but the man reads twenty-five hours a day, eight days a week. He is a scholar of the supernatural, a good friend, a rock of dependability and probably the most damaged person I know… aside from myself.

So, that's it.

I could go on, could analyze Pastor Jim, Caleb Dorney, Ellen Harvelle and a score of others, could identify another dozen variations on the theme, but what would be the point? You get the idea. Uncontrolled grief. Channeled grief. Buried grief. However you look at it, grief rules all our lives as hunters. It's the one thing we all have in common. So where do I fall in this catalogue of misery? I prefer not to dwell too long on that subject. The doctor who treats himself has a crazy man for a patient and the lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client. I try hard to be neither. I mostly fail, but God knows I do try. Besides, what difference does it make how they label me when I'm gone? History will think what it wants. It always does. My boys will believe what their individual natures lead them to believe, and these days theirs are the only opinions that matter to me, and even what they think doesn't matter very much.

What matters is keeping my boys safe.

What matters is keeping what's left of my family alive.

What matters is telling demon-kind to shove it where the sun don't shine.

What matters is getting that damn thing that killed Mary before it can get Sammy, too.

What matters is ensuring that Dean doesn't lose anything else he loves, even if it's just that old car.

What matters is my boys.

Period.

You hear me, Azazel, you rotten son of a bitch?

Be afraid.

I'm coming for you.


End file.
